AMD has been talking about its Fusion technology, which will combine the CPU and GPU in a single unit, for some time now. It's not due until next year, so we were taken aback when the first incarnation of Fusion turned out to be software, not silicon.
It looks as though AMD has taken a leaf out of Google’s book as AMD Fusion For …

Wrote this sort of app ages ago

to get some game to run better. Got sick of manually shutting down all the crap manually so I spent... ooh, 5 hours max finding how to write and then writing the code to do it all- and reset it after your game's finished. I didn't need the automated Overclocking as my system used to be pretty well overclocked all the time anyway.

They're missing a trick, though- having a "launch game" command line setting so you can drag + drop a game onto it and it not only gets rid of the background crap from your session but also kicks the game up to "High" priority. Which gives me a noticeable speed boost on some games.

AMD, feel free to use those ideas. My consultancy fee is 1x of your quad-core processors and an appropriate motherboard and graphics card.

You sure?

The article seems to allude (whilst munching a jacket spud and not giving full attention) that you need an ATI compliant motherboard - surely any INTEL chipset will suffice as long as it supports ATI Crossfire etc - so should in turn support the 'overdrive'

Close other windows...

Well there's your problem

"...it made no measurable difference to the performance of our test PC which was built on an MSI DKA790GX motherboard with a Phenom X4 9850 processor and 2GB of 1066MHz DDR 2..."

Well, duh. You have a respectable system there. Shutting down extraneous processes would only have significant gains on marginal systems -- the ones that need every byte of RAM and ever cycle of CPU to even qualify to run the game.

Let me guess: you also ran it on a clean install that was fully patched, so you didn't have to worry about Windows Update or the rest of the stuff that invariably takes more and more memory and CPU time as a Windows installation gets more use (i.e, the stuff this software was designed to help you deal with.)

Promoting something with an epic fail...

I agree that this would only be useful in trying to tweak a marginal system to reach an acceptable performance level - but in the context of Vista's resource requirement, I'd be very surprised if it were any help at all.

Switching back to XP, on the other hand, would bring tangible improvements in performance.